User Guide: Jaksta Music Miner for Mac

Overview

Jaksta Music Miner is an easy way to download the music you love from your favorite streaming music sites. Once monitoring, Music Miner will save music files from many popular streaming music sites as they play on your Mac.

These files can be transferred to other devices like your iPod, iPhone, iPad, or burned to a CD.

Music Miner uses a Music Fingerprinting technology to automatically identify and tag all recorded music files.

How Music Miner Records

Music Miner locates the web address of the music file you are playing, reconnects to the host server, and makes an exact copy of the file on your Mac. Typically, this download process is much faster than actually playing the file. Once the download process starts, you can close audio player, and the file will continue to be captured.

Note: Some web sites use encryption when streaming audio. Music Miner cannot downloaded these encrypted streams.

How to Start Recording

Open Music Miner and and any compatible audio stream you play will be downloaded. You can switch monitoring OFF or ON using the button at the bottom left of Music Miner.

When Music Miner is actively monitoring for media to record, the ON/OFF slider changes to the OFF position. When Music Miner is switched OFF, nothing will be downloaded until it is switched on again.

Music Miner also displays its status in the OSX menu bar. The icon changes to blue when Music Miner is actively monitoring. Click the icon and you can easily switch monitoring on or off.

About Track Tagging

Music Miner uses a digital fingerprinting technology to automatically recognize and tag the music you have downloaded. In some cases the track may not be identified by the music database. You can easily edit the track information from within Music Miner.

Click once in the area that you would like to change. A blue box will appear.

Type your desired track, artist or album name.

Note: If you would like to view the file in Finder, simply right-click on the track in your list and select Reveal in Finder.

Send Track(s) to iTunes

Music Miner can send all your recorded tracks to iTunes by enabling that option in Preferences. Or you can pick and choose which tracks to send to your iTunes library

Select a track or tracks then hover your mouse just to the left of the track name. A few icons will appear.

Click the
icon and the selected track(s) will be added to iTunes.

The tracks status will change to Sent to iTunes.

How to Play your Downloaded Music

There are many ways to play your downloaded music. Here are a few:

Select a track that you would like to play. Hover your mouse just to the left of the track name. A few icons will appear.

Click the
and your track will begin to play. The icon will change to a stop icon. Simply click it to stop playing.

OR

Right click on the track and select Reveal in Finder.

Right-click on the track in Finder and select Open With.

Choose your desired application to play the file.

OR

Open your chosen download location as set in Preferences.

Choose files to play.

Preferences

From the Music Miner menu bar, select Music Miner then Preferences. Here is what you can configure:

Prompt to Start Monitoring as startup: will show the welcome screen every time you open Music Miner. Leave this unselected and Music Miner will begin monitoring automatically upon opening.

Check for Updates on Startup: will check to see if there is a new version of Music Miner available to download.

Show Music Miner in menu bar: turns on or off the display of the Music Miner icon and menu in the OSX menu bar.

Enable Growl support: Music Miner uses Growl to discreetly show you when a stream has been detected and is downloading or completed. You can turn this on or off.

Play sound when download finishes or start/stop monitoring: We like the sounds. But if you don’t, here’s where you can turn them off.

Automatically add to iTunes: Will add all downloaded music tracks to your iTunes library when they are finished downloading and converting.

Enable debug mode: Use this only when requested by technical support. It generates a more detailed log if you should need help.

Find Log File: This is very helpful. If you are submitting a tech support ticket, we can help you better if you attach your log file.

Download location: Set the folder where you’d like Music Miner to keep your downloaded music.

Minimum Download Size: Specifies the smallest file that is saved. Sometimes when recording, small advertisement might be captured by Music Miner. You can increase the size if you discover you are getting too many unwanted files. The default minimum size is 200kb. We find this is satisfactory for most.

Simultaneous Downloads: The is the maximum number of downloads happening at any one time. The default is 10.

Always Record HTTP: When checked, HTTP streams will be recorded rather than downloaded. This requires that you leave the player open for the entire track as the data is recording in real-time rather than downloading.

Always Record RTMP: When checked, RTMP streams will be recorded rather than downloaded. This requires that you leave the player open for the entire track as the data is recording in real-time rather than downloading.

Filter Known Advert Servers: will stop advertisements from known servers from downloading.

Conversion Location set the folder that you would like Jaksta to save your converted files.

Multi Core Conversions if enabled will use additional CPU cores (if available). This can result in faster conversions, but uses more processing power.

Some web sites or media player programs may use non-standard ports for playing media files. You can add other ports if you discover that a different port is being used and Music Miner isn’t recording something it should.

This dialog shows the HTTP content types that Jaksta recognizes, and what extension it adds to the saved file. You will only need to change this if you are technically savvy, and a new media type is discovered.

This dialog shows the HTTP content types that Music Miner recognizes, and what extension it adds to the saved file. You will only need to change this if you are technically savvy, and a new media type is discovered.

Ignore Shockwave Flash: Leave this checked if you want Music Miner to ignore SWF files like flash banner ads.

Max number of segments: When Music Minor downloads, it asks for different parts of the media simultaneously. This effectively speeds up the downloading process. If you find that Music Miner is using too much network bandwidth to record, reduce this number. Increasing this to more than 5 segments won’t speed up downloads though.

Minimum Segment size: Lets you determine how big the smallest segments to download should be. For example, if this is set to 300 Kb, and the size of the video to be downloaded is 300 Kb, then a single request will be used. For smaller media files, downloading with a single request is faster than using multiple segments.